1. Gaelic Poetry

2. intro Some of them write in Gaelic > translate into English
Translatorese, familiar and unfamiliar
Distance between E and G styles and practices
Dissimilarity as fruitful inspiration
Irony plays little part
Nostalgia, heroism, lament, lyricism, praise, elegy
Rural, agriculture, farming, fishing
Scylla and Charybdis:
parochialism & esotericism
Less than 80,000 speakers
Edge of Europe, edge of time
Extinction of language?
Less than 100 active poets

3. Sorley maclean Somhairle MacGill-Eain (1911-96)
Life, works (pdf notes)
„Hallaig”
The clearance of 94 families off Raasay in the 1840s
Transcendence of time and love to redeem betrayal of histroy ~ Dunn
„The Cry of Europe”
Rhetoric, repetition, adjectives, 5 rhetorical Qs
Muir: feebleness of Scotland, apocalyptic vision
Both public and personal
Anger at fascism in Spain after the Civil War, ~ Auden
„Calvary”
~HM, small things
Urban modernity, sympathy with poverty
„Going Westwards”
Celtic experience translated to desert warfare
North Africa, ~ Morgan
Conclusions
Brings ancient Celtic tradition in touch with modernity

4. Derick Thomson Ruaraidh MacThómais (1921-2012) Life, works (pdf notes)
Opinion (pdf, notes)
„The Herring Girls”
Lives of women fish-gutters, slaves, sexism, heroism, pride
Image – thought – conclusion
Life on the island, portraits of individuals and a group
Patience, sensitivity, strength
Conclusion
Conflict between traditionalism and modernity
Being torn between 2 languages
Modern Gaelic culture / language is not his language any more
Inauthentic road signs in Gaelic, translated school texts, Gaelic TV

5. Iain crichton smith Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn (1928-98)
Life, works (pdf, notes)
Bilingualism
Divided intellect
In the dress of the Fool, the two colours have tormented me – English and Gaelic, black and red…(„The Fool”)
Religion, lost world of childhood, darkened by Presbyterianism
Alastair Reid, „Scotland” (p. 28)
„The Clearances”
A culture in decline, groeing old, desert landscape, exile at home
Historical – economic exploitation
threat of extinction of Gaelic: „Shall Gaelic Die?”
„sometimes I hear graves singing / their Gaelic songs to the dingos”
„Gaelic Stories”
Little vignettes
Potato and hering, standard diet
Tough, cold, raw, lyrically beautiful island life

6. 2nd & 3rd generation gaelic poets
Aonghas MacNeacail (1942-), Meg Bateman (1959-), Christopher Whyte (1952-), Rody Gorman (1960-), Niall O’Gallagher (1981-)
(Inter-)national interpreters of Gaelic culture: MacNeacail
Challenging old order
2nd language Gaelic speakers
Lack of facing translations: Whyte , O’Gallagher
Hybridisation with an anglophone bias
Danger of being reduced to a hobby or interest-group

7. George Mackay Brown Life, works (pdf, notes) „Hamnavoe Market”
Vignettes, kennings: ingenious metaphors (cf. MacCaig, Martians)
Stromness, myth, legend, history, memory
Language: contemporary, minimalist + archaic, biblical
…they don’t speak Scots here, really, though naturally there are quite a few Scots words. But the language derives originally from Scandinavian and Icelandic. It’s all been filtered through the English language, but it retains quite a few f those earlier characteristics. …Scotland came into Orkney’s story fairly alte, around 1497, when Orkney wa incorporated into Scotland. So we don’t feel entirely Scottish. (interview)
Modernist poetics + ancient material
Associations with myths and Christian rituals

8. GMB contd Main topic: negotiations of identity and temporality
Roman Catholicism
Myths of origins and renewal
Timeless pagan myths combined withChristian symbolism:
JC’s parables taken from agricultural life: fishermen with ploughs, loaves and fishes
GMB finds univesal meanings in parables
Transformation of everyday experience to seek resurrection of spirit
Faith in the suparnatural
History (story) mapped on mythology (fable)
Orcadian / Arcadian
Organic community ~ Muir
Traditional values, to resist progress, industrialisation: a rootless utilitarian faith, without beauty or mystery
Natural round of seasons, agricultural years
Vision of apocalypse, Black Pentecost, returns te world to its first principles, ~ Muir, „The Horses”